Everything you need to raise your Core

What is PixieBuddy

PixieBuddy is a classic virtual desktop pet. A little crystal Core is born, lives on your desktop as a transparent always-on-top window, grows into its adult form, and stays by your side forever.

You interact entirely through a clickable radial menu — there is no chat and no AI. Everything runs offline on your machine. The whole experience is built around gentle, classic care: your pet reacts to attention, grows, plays, collects cards, and never punishes you for stepping away.

Getting started

Your very first Core makes the full journey from a raw technological core to a permanent adult. It only happens once — after that, new Cores arrive already grown.

The first launch

• A brand-new Core (EV0) is fabricated in about 30 seconds.
• When it hatches into a baby, the app asks you to give it a name. That unlocks the First Name achievement.
• From there it grows through four stages over a few days into its permanent adult form. See Evolution for the timing.

The core loop

Once you understand it, every day looks like this: keep the four care bars comfortable, let your pet sleep at night, play a mini-game or two, give some affection, and — once you reach adulthood — recycle Cores to discover new rarities and fill your collection.

Menu & controls

Everything is done from the radial bubble menu (click your pet) and the system tray icon. Icons are pixel-art; the settings gear is always last.

Radial menu

System tray

Right-click the tray icon to show/hide the pet, pause, toggle the light, or quit. The tray tooltip shows your pet's name, stage and current mood.

Care stats

Your pet has four everyday bars — hunger, happiness, energy and cleanliness — plus health, which sits behind them. The four bars slowly drain over time; your actions top them back up.

How health works

Health is the safety net. It reacts to the state of the four bars:

• If any bar falls very low, health starts to slip. If two or more bars are low, it slips slowly. The more critical bars there are, the faster it drops.
• When all four bars are comfortable, health slowly recovers on its own.
• If health falls to about 35 or below, your pet becomes sick. It recovers from sickness once health climbs back up and the bars are healthy again.

Sleep & day/night

Sleep is dual: it happens automatically on a schedule, and you can also control it manually with the light at any time.

Automatic schedule

• Your pet falls asleep on its own at night, around 10 PM (22:00).
• It wakes up by itself in the morning, around 8 AM (08:00).
• While asleep it shows Zzz, doesn't open speech bubbles, and refills energy. No bars drain and health is frozen.
• On waking it takes a single morning hunger hit, so it's usually hungry first thing.

Manual light

Use the light toggle (💡 in the menu or the tray) to send your pet to sleep or wake it whenever you like — the manual choice overrides the schedule for that period.

Illness & cure

Sickness is a recoverable state, never a punishment. If health drops too far (around 35 or below), your pet gets sick and shows a fever thermometer.

Two ways to heal

• Normal care: get the bars back up and keep them comfortable — health rises and the sickness clears on its own.
• Medicine (💉): the syringe button appears in the menu only while your pet is sick. One dose restores a big chunk of health and clears the sickness instantly.

The moment your pet is cured, the thermometer and sick state vanish immediately — you don't wait for the next tick. After a dose there's a short immunity window, so extra doses right away are simply ignored.

Temperament (feeding)

Feeding does two things: it restores hunger and temporarily installs a temperament module that changes only how your pet moves and idles for a few hours.

The module lasts about 4 hours and then expires on its own back to Balanced. It affects only movement — it never punishes hunger or energy, and it doesn't change your Core's fixed personality, evolution, gem or family.

Bonding

Your bond is the relationship you build with your pet over time. It only ever goes up.

• It rises through affection, baths, play and other positive interactions.
• It never decays from being away — step away for as long as you like.
• It feeds achievements and affectionate moments. Reaching 90 bond points unlocks Best Company.

Open the Core panel (💎) to see your bond in points alongside your Core's fixed personality traits.

Evolution

A Core grows through five stages — from a raw core to a permanent adult. Growth is driven by real time, not by feeding.

Each stage change plays a short upgrade ("solder") animation during which your pet briefly sleeps, then wakes in its new form. Stages advance automatically once enough time has passed.

First journey vs. later Cores

• Your very first Core makes the full EV0 → EV4 journey once.
• After that first journey is complete, every Core you recycle or roll arrives already adult (EV4) — no waiting.

Rarity & pity

Every Core is generated from a unique seed that produces a rarity score from 0–100. That score maps to one of five tiers, each with its own gem and colour.

The Mythic pity system

You're never unlucky forever. Every time you recycle without landing a Mythic, your pity counter goes up (up to a maximum of 45). As pity climbs:

• Common and Uncommon fade out — their chances shrink toward zero as you pass roughly two-thirds of the bar.
• Rare, Epic and Mythic converge toward roughly equal chances (about a third each) at the top.
• Landing a Mythic resets pity to zero.

Because the top three even out, a Mythic is never guaranteed — pity just stops the game from being cruel. Since recycling has a 24-hour cooldown, one pity point is roughly one day.

Birth card & signature

The same seed that sets rarity also mints a fixed birth card — a collectible profile that never changes with care. Open it any time from the Core panel (💎).

What's on the card

• Cosmic origin — a real astronomical place, from the Solar System, Moon and planets up to distant stars and nebulae. Rarer tiers unlock more exclusive origins.
• Chassis material — from everyday alloys and polymers up to exotic materials like sapphire crystal, iridium alloy or graphene aerogel.
• Height & size class — roughly 21–35 cm, classed as Small, Medium or Large.
• Mass — derived from height and material density, so a dense material or a big silhouette makes a heavier Core.

Personality (fixed traits)

Each Core is born with fixed personality values that never change with care:

Recycling & the shelf

Recycling is how you start fresh and grow your collection — and you never lose anything by doing it.

How recycling works

• The Recycle (♻️) button asks for confirmation and has a 24-hour cooldown (so Mythic re-rolls can't be spammed).
• Recycling archives your current Core to the shelf and mints an immutable card of it, stamped with its era and version.
• You can reactivate any archived Core later whenever you want.
• The new Core arrives already adult (once your first journey is done) with a freshly rolled rarity.

The holographic card viewer

Click a card's thumbnail on the shelf to open an interactive viewer: the card tilts in 3D following your mouse, with a specular highlight, a rainbow layer and animated sparkles. The effect gets more intense with higher rarity and finish. The collection panel also tracks which rarities you've discovered.

Mini-games

Three mini-games live under the Play (🎮) menu. Every match rewards care and counts toward achievements — and none of them punish you for losing.

Tic-Tac-Toe ⭕

You play X, your pet plays O. Each of the pet's moves is decided 50% by a perfect minimax AI (never loses) and 50% by an easy heuristic (win → block → center → corner → random), so it's genuinely unpredictable even if you know the code.

• Win → a double care reward (happiness & bond ×2).
• Draw → a single reward.
• Loss → no penalty to your bond.
• A rewarded match costs a small ~2 points of energy, once per game.

Scanner Mode 📡

Also called Hide-the-Core. Your pet camouflages and leaves a hidden ping somewhere safe on screen. You track it down using the radar before time runs out.

• Listen for the sonar bips: a countdown, a camouflage confirmation, a periodic sonar sweep, and an alert when the signal changes.
• Click the hidden ping in time to win — this unlocks Signal Found.

Pixel Beats 💧

A 4-lane rhythm game played with D F J K (or tap). It has three genuinely different arrangements, drawn from a shuffle bag so you see all three before any repeats:

• Adventure Melody — pitched notes with an audible accompaniment.
• Accessible Drums — a clear, steady pulse.
• Crystal Synth — shimmering arpeggios.

Each mode has its own chart, rhythm and backing track, including long/held notes. What matters is not missing — hitting late still counts. You get a grade at the end:

Any win unlocks Beat Master. The game is fully polyphonic and has a mute button.

Achievements

There are 16 trophies on a Steam/Xbox-style shelf (unlocked vs. locked, each with its requirement). Achievements are pure memory — they never lock any pet rule, they just record your journey.

Languages & audio

The whole interface — including achievements and the music modes — is translated into 7 languages: English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Russian.

• You pick your language on first run and can switch any time from the menu.
• Audio is royalty-free 8-bit chiptune generated offline, with a shared melodic identity: short memorable motifs for interactions, a brief farewell at sleep, and progressively fuller jingles for startup, evolution, achievements, Epic and Mythic.
• Everything plays locally, Pixel Beats is polyphonic, and there's a mute button.

Privacy & offline

PixieBuddy is 100% offline. It uses no AI at runtime, never talks to the internet, and sends data nowhere.

• No network, no login, no telemetry.
• All state lives in a local save.json (with an automatic save.bak.json backup and atomic, corruption-safe writes).
• No cloud, no model, no third-party sound or sprite at runtime — the pixel-art and chiptune are original to PixieBuddy.

Tips & quick answers